War wages in the publishing industry. On the one hand, you have evil authors, agents, publishers, and reviewers locked in a conspiracy to prevent really good novels from being published and on the other side you find the ‘Indy’ self-publishers who right injustices in a battle for truth, justice, and the American way of life.

You can call the latter self-pubbers, indies, micro-presses, and independents, but they abhor the term ‘vanity press’ as politically incorrect. They’re the noble gunslingers, shouldering the responsibility of cleaning up arrogance and hegemony in town. According to them, mainstream publishing is in its death throes, a victim of its incomprehensible refusal to publish the "really good books" coming out of vanity publishing, books many claim are as "good or better" than anything found on store shelves today.

Christians 1, Lionizers 0

When Fran Rizer planned a book tour swing through Orlando, she asked me about local bookstores, particularly independents. One of the largest is Longs Christian Bookstore in College Park. I phoned Longs to ask if they sponsored book signings.

The manager said, "This isn’t any of that self-published crap, is it?"

I almost fell out of my chair laughing. I’ve got to admire a man who doesn’t mince words. He went on to explain they occasionally tried vanity press books and found them not only unsellable, but unreadable.

Paths to Publishing

LinkedIn.com is one of the oldest social networking sites on the internet and perhaps the most professional. Originally designed as an experiment in six degrees of separation, you’ll now find artists, accountants, movie producers, lawyers, and you’ll find the inventors of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee and Jean-François Groff. You’ll also find a number of authors, such as Toni Kelner and Dylan Powell. The three of us joined a group called Published Authors Network.

Mistake.

… at least on my part. I’m not an expert, but "Self-Published Authors Vanity Presses" would have been much closer. The group turns out to be run by a self-described self-publishing professional. I felt like I’d been handed a free ticket to the circus and found myself in an evangelist’s tent.

Fiction aside– and friction aside– I believe self-publishing can serve a purpose. A vanity press proponent recently pointed out public speakers and seminar speakers know they can demand more money and higher fees if they have written a book. Many speakers put together books typically outside the interest of mainstream publishers and the general public, and publish them in a fraction of the time it takes to find a willing agent and a willing publisher. Self-publishing works for them because it’s a sideline that promotes their primary cause.

Other potential uses for self-publishing include:

yearbooks

how-to manuals

technical guides

family histories

small town guides

religious tracts

political treatises

limited audience novels

books fallen out of print

time limitations

The last needs explanation. A man in his latter 70s explained if he waited to break into publishing via the traditional route, he’d be dead. That’s a position we can appreciate.

However, his feeling simultaneously sums up what is good about self-publishing and what is bad:

Many people dream of retiring and publishing that book they’ve always wanted.

Yes, he can get his book out there.

Yes, he’s taking a shortcut.

No, it’s probably not ready for prime-time.

Therein likes the rub. Self-pubbers vociferously, even angrily argue their books are as good or better than those from traditional publishers. They have the proof right there in their hand– real paper, real numbered pages, color cover, and probably an ISBN bar code.

Arrogant mainstream reviewers, they say, won’t touch their works, so for as little as $50, they can get a guaranteed positive review.

T-Ball

Vanity publishing is like T-ball:

Everyone gets a chance at bat, gets a hit, and takes home a trophy. But don’t expect anyone other than your mom to applaud.

Neither authors nor readers are well-served by self-published fiction. When Janet Hutchings or Linda Landrigan turn down a story of mine, I trust they have good reason. They want to see writers succeed, but they have a responsibility to the stockholders and readers, and the margins in publishing are astonishingly small. They not only do the reader a favor by turning down a story that’s not ready, they do the writer a favor as well.

Stephen Kelner proposed a hypothesis that successfully published authors have the ability to postpone gratification. He further writes "The ranks of the self-published are remarkably contemptuous of professionals who have spent their lives learning to read, edit, and sell books."

Good self-published books are out there, few and far between, but they can be found. We know this because one or another is occasionally picked up by a mainstream publisher. I can’t help but wonder if said author could have saved a lot of time and trouble doing homework, their dues, and finding a good agent.

One Hand Washes the Other

My irritation isn’t with self-published authors, but an industry that preys upon them. I am troubled by the deceit I see in the world of vanity publishing. It begins with the vanity presses that often claim to be "traditional publishers", but with a "lower threshold of acceptance". The deceit grows with self-publishing consultants and promoters, usually self-published themselves, who pat the new author on the back and tell her the mainstream presses are collapsing in the face of "democratization revolutions" taking place in the publishing industry.

Whenever someone mixes political rhetoric and either the arts or sex in the same sentence, you know someone’s about to be unpleasantly screwed.

There are no absolutes. You’ll find the occasional dud from big-name authors and you might stumble across a gem from an unknown self-published author. It happens.

15 comments

Thanks for the shout-out, Leigh. Just by the by, when I started my research for the book I didn’t originally hypothesize about the ability of writers to postpone gratification — instead, the data I gathered demonstrated it overwhelmingly.
Thanks for this thoughtful post. /Steve

Good points, Leigh, but you might have made a clearer distinction between vanity presses that charge large fees and self-publisher such as Lulu that do not. I’m not talking about using one for the Great American Novel, but consider the three local high school sports books I ran through Lulu. To say that the sales possibilities for the “History of Football at Cuyahoga Falls High School” are limited is a gross understement even for me. Originally the three books were locally produced and looked like what they were, something run off on a copier. Years after they became available to local fans and former players I heard about Lulu. Today they can be had in perfect bound form with slick covers. The difference is similar to comparing a new Porsche with a 1927 Essex.
So for certain things, Lulu and a few other for-free outfits serve a useful purpose. My only regret is that Lulu wasn’t available ten years ago.

I gather Lulu and the university presses try to be clear what you get and what you don’t. While researching, I heard self-publishers comment favorably on Cushing-Malloy and Morris Publishing.

I haven’t heard comments one way or the other regarding Amazon’s CreateSpace, but while their BookSurge group improved its print quality, I came across a number of complaints about their business practices. One person commented it was a cheaper way to get screwed. Apparently Amazon muscles would-be authors to use them instead of, say iUniverse, while not making books available to competitors like Barnes & Noble. Don’t take this as definitive; I grapple with figuring out what works how.

Leigh,
Thanks for using the cover of my third Callie Parrish mystery, Casket Case, in your column today. I noticed, however, that most of today’s thoughts are about self-publishing. I want your readers to know that my books are not, and have never been, self-published. I went the traditional query letter route and found a great agent who pitched Callie and landed a deal with Berkley Prime Crime, a wonderful division of Penguin.
Fran

My father had a mentor who had had an interesting life (served under Patton for one thing) but he knew no one would want to publish is autobiography, so he self-published and gave away all the copies to his friends. Perfect use of the technique.

The other classic use, which you mentioned, Leigh, is the expert in some technical skill, such as a hobby. You have a website about making teapots out of chicken wire, people invoite you to lecture on doing it, they want more information – you know who the audience is and how to sell it, so why split the money with a publisher?

On the other hand, there is no good reason for publishing with a vanity press (unless you count vanity as a good reason).

For the record, my movel was published by a small but traditional publisher.

Interesting column, Leigh. In shedding some light on this subject, you’ve probably done some of our fellow writers a good turn.

Several of my friends have gone (against my advice) the self-publishing/vanity-publishing route, and for some of them maybe it was a good move — it might’ve been their only way to get their books in print. For others I think it would have been far better to invest the work and the time required to go the traditional route. (They’d have even saved a lot of money.)

I agree with you about “vanity” publishing. They aren’t worth a rat’s whatsis. But neither are traditional agents and publishers. How can one disagree with that old saying: “A literary agent and traditional publisher aren’t worth the gunpowder it would take to blow them to…wherever that place was and the only good one is a dead one with a wooden stake driven through its heart.

Some might say (and am I ever gonna take a beatin’ for this) that the mystery mags are like many consider Harlequin—some break out big time and some don’t.

I think that depends on what one means by “breaking out” — one might justifiably claim that selling a story to AHMM or EQMM is breaking out, at least as far as the mystery short story market is concerned. There aren’t other markets any more from which to judge.

It used to be that slicks published short fiction, too. That was certainly a more upscale market than the digest-sized magazines, but it no longer exists.

“There are nine-and-sixty ways of composing tribal lays/and every single one of them is right!” –Rudyard Kipling. One of my favorite quotes when talking to the content of my book shown above. But I hasten to point out that that does NOT mean, to my mind (nor would it to Kipling), that there are no standards and we cannot draw lines. Some are inappropriate (romance writers are the most professional and productive writers I know, to alisa’s point) I agree heartily that small runs are often best published by the increasingly slick and inexpensive services. But it is important to differentiate between limited runs and limited quality! I think many self-published people are publishing too soon, and as a result miss out on a lot of potential.
The (mainstream) published writers I investigated for my research were phenomenally capable of postponing gratification, as we say. (The measure I used averages around 1.75 with a standard deviation of .25. The average of the published writers I assessed was fourteen, which is so far off the scale it comes back around.) I don’t think it’s an accident.

Speaking of short-stories, I know an excellent one about a self-published book. That’s “Travels With My Cats” by Mike Resnick. I have read many bios of authors neglected during their lifetimes which include the phrase “privately published” regarding a work that wound up having a larger audience after the author’s death.

Jeff, there’s a strange and amazing book containing hundreds of pages of graphic arts and montages by a man who was considered mentally handicapped. I’ve forgotten details including the author’s name, but amongst graphic novelists, his book has become iconic.

Here in Florida, there was a case of another graphic novelist who photocopied and stapled his own graphic novels which he distributed to friends. The local prosecutor stumbled across it and brought him up on distribution of pornography charges. (I know, I know, but this IS Florida.) As so often happens here, the prosecutor didn’t have much of a case, but he had the weight of county government behind him to make the poor schlep’s life miserable. As I recall, he was released on bond and allowed to escape to New York. Apparently those early stapled issues are traded on eBay.

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